alumni profile
Megan Berthold
“Our clients are highly resilient people in general,
continued FROM THE PREVIOUS page
and I continually feel very inspired by the clients
“I’m glad I have the chance to span the different levels of social work,” she says, “which I really enjoy because each part informs the other.” Working in a national consortium of 30 freestanding organizations in a project housed at the Oregon Health Sciences University, Berthold is working with colleagues to collect data on torture survivors, a hard-to-reach population with origins in more than 150 countries. “The data is really important because it informs and supports policy, and in our case, specific legislation, like the Refugee Protection Act that has recently been introduced by Senator Patrick Leahy,” says Berthold. “There are some significant reforms proposed to the refugee law that also covers asylum. And one thing that fits in specifically with our work is the elimination of an existing rule that one has to apply for
that I work with—the creativity, the problem-solving skills, the perspective on life, when they seem to have lost everything.”
asylum within your first year in the U.S.” A time frame that many torture survivors, for trauma-related reasons, let slip by. “We have clients who may have been tortured repeatedly over a long period of time, in many cases sexually-related torture, and they get here and they’re in shock. They’re profoundly depressed. They may be grappling with suicide. They don’t even want to know if they want to be alive and so, starting the asylum process, especially if the application itself asks you to revisit the experience in quite a bit of detail, that can be a very retraumatizing process,” explains Berthold.
Remaining Resilient
program for torture victims
www.ptvla.org
18
The gravity of the experiences of PTV clients are difficult to recount and often difficult to listen to, even for experienced social workers. When asked how she finds and keeps her balance in
her work, Berthold recounts how every professional who enters this work confronts issues of vicarious trauma, which can be triggered by even reading a written record of mock executions, multiple serious traumas, and murders of loved ones. “If you want to stay in this type of work, as I’ve chosen to do,” she advises, “you need to build a self-care plan and revisit that periodically. Although,” she adds, “this kind of work isn’t for everyone.” At the same time, the flip side of the vicarious trauma experience can be “vicarious resilience.” As she describes it, “Our clients are highly resilient people in general, and I continually feel very inspired by the clients that I work with—the creativity, the problem-solving skills, the perspective on life— when they seem to have lost everything.” “It helps to put one’s own day-to-day challenges in perspective and makes you say, ‘Well, I can get through
this.’ And so it can rub off in a positive way.” Over the course of her 23 years working with survivors of torture and other state-sponsored terror, Megan Berthold has found ways to keep this work deeply enriching in many ways, all while supporting survivors of torture to rebuild their lives and safely reunite with their families, and she contributes to research that supports sound, humane public policy. �
“[This type of work] helps to put one’s own day-to-day challenges in perspective and makes you say, ‘Well, I can get through this.’ And so it can rub off in a positive way.”
NewsForum | FALL/WINTER 2010-2011